Taking the lid off transport planning

Last night I gave a short talk to the Urban Design Institute of South Africa and I motivated for a process to move us towards a new design manual for roads and streets in South Africa. It's time to move past the divisions of the past; the process should be one which brings together designers and engineers in a mutually respectful way.

I also suggested that if designers are to be heard by engineers then they need to be more convincing in their arguments, appealing to the language of engineers (which is dominated by talk of efficiency, safety and the economy). Designers - consider this a strategy for effective projects rather than selling your soul!

So here are some progressive Manuals to help us get started with the task of finding a shared language:

Dutch: Recommendations for Traffic Provisions in Built-up Areas

British: UK Manual for Streets


The Americans have also been waking up to this theme, under the name of Context-Sensitive Solutions

I have a few ideas on this blog which also give ideas for bridging the language gap, see the tag 'street design', and there are links to follow also.

Enjoy.

Sustainable transport and energy

So here I am lecturing again, which I love to do by the way, this time to the "Energy for sustainable urban development" students at UCT. Hello and welcome.

Here is a commentary on the sources which I used for the lecture on 13 November.

I started off by saying that energy is linked to CO2 emmissions, and while this is broadly true, the reality is that the aggregate transport data is simply not often shown in energy terms, and I think that is a reflection of the low profile of energy in the transport debates. The work that has been done, though, puts transport/mobility use/outputs at 25-50% of total. I referred to the excellent WWF One Planet Business report, and the (also excellent!) City of Cape Town State of Energy Report 2007.

I went on to talk about how transport obviously covers a range of sectors, some city, some regional, some international. The focus for the talk was on land-based transport, although on a per km basis air travel is a heavy energy user. The WWF has some concise and well considered information on issues in air travel.

The problem with any comparison on energy use between modes is that the outcome depends heavily on occupancy, trip length and prevailing conditions. So, to use an example from the South African context, although a minibus taxi is clearly way more energy efficient per passenger in the peak when occupancies are high, and average private car occupancies tend towards 1, the situation in the off-peak is less clear-cut. Nevertheless - don't let this example cloud your view - this is an extreme example and in all comparisons, regardless of occupancy, private car is clearly the most energy inefficient way to travel.

I went on to show overall energy use by mode for the EEU . Fuel consumption data is also available for South Africa from SAPIA. Some very accessible work on transport, energy and environment in developing countries has been done by Paul Barter in Asia, and we gave his basic principles document to you as a handout. (Paul Barter developed the lovely egg-energy comparison which demonstrates the energy efficient nature of the cycle).

The strong relationship between GDP or wealth growth and car ownership was illustrated through an international comparison from the Commission for Integrated Transport. The point to remember of course is that not all countries show the same strength of relationahip between wealth and car ownership, and so governmental policy does seem to also be a significant factor, and who knows what the future holds?

Then I showed you a series of slides from the Worldmapper series to illustrate how wealth, cars and fuel use are currently concentrated in the Global North. The forecasts of car ownership, though, show that the most growth into the future will likely come from India and China, and that there is still enormous potential for growth in the car market there (and here).

So the question is - what to do? I showed you several slides illustrating the car culture which we live in and which - I suggest - we are largely unaware of. The culture of cars is the air we breathe, the sights we see, the ads we read and view. (Twenty-five percent of global ad-spend is car related.) I asked you to think (or feel?) what the advertisers are actually selling to you? The first response - status, then freedom, power, speed, safety, convenience. (Afterwards I reflected on how different the male and female responses were!) We didn't talk about sex-appeal...

Clearly the advertisers and car manufacturers have been very successful! They tap into some deep human cravings! And any response to car culture must address that more emotive, sensory, qualitative part of human nature if it is to be successful. In the next post I will talk about what that means in practice. (And in later posts I will get to those questions which you posed at the end).